Matthew, what network driver are you using? That is likly the cause of any tcp/ip performance issues you are seeing.

As for USB mice, you can enable them to work by simply starting the USB stack and devu-mouse+devi-hirun (pre-6.2.1) or io-hid+devi-hid (6.2.1). I am using my wireless intellimouse explorer just fine with devi-hid.

The key to making things work under a heavy load are to setup priorities properly. Under a normal session, all apps run at priority 10. So if you have something computationally intensive drop it down to 9. Nothing at 10 will be stopped any longer and the priority 9 process will get 100% of the free CPU time. It works very well. The opposite is also a possibility - having critial tasks raised in priority. So, for example, media playback threads will run at priority 12.